Shadow Puppets

My first exposure to the shadow puppets was their display in the film The Year of Living Dangerously, starring transgender Linda Hunt, except that she wasn’t transgender, the term was not in use then, she merely played a man, a photographer. A pre-antisemitic Mel Gibson also starred. Based on a novel by C.J. Koch. Journos in Jakarta, all of them hearing the siren call of Vietnam. We forget that Indonesia was the Dutch East Indies, that Bali was the only Hindu territory outside of the subcontinent and that once women there normally went bare-breasted. Suharto replaced Sukarno and their names were similar enough that no one paid attention. I thought the word for those “puppets” was wayang (as in wayang on the left) but I could be wrong. Of bhasa Indonesia I know nothing.

Pablo Neruda’s first wife was from the Dutch East Indies (not the girl of Veinte poemas), she returned to the Netherlands just in time to see the country overrun by Panzer Divisions. Now Indonesia is the world’s largest–by population–Muslim country, but theirs is a tolerant Islam, alcohol is permitted and restrictions imposed by the Prophet (pbuh) are interpreted in a generous fashion.

Gil Williams, who wrote Man on a String (as Michael Wolfe) loved Vietnam, not so much the American War, but the combination of French and Chinese food that gave rise to Vietnamese cuisine. On Panama Canal transits he sought out ships that offered French Basque cuisine which he judged superior to almost all others. He would be happy to learn that Vietnam today follows not the Khmer Rouge but Deng Xiao Ping.

When I was in Phnom Penh I saw the ads for buses to Vietnam, Sài gòn only four hours away, Miami to Tampa, I had to go. Crossing the border it suddenly became possible to read the signs, though I didn’t know what they meant. English widely spoken, French not so much. But Orangina avec sandwich jambon beurre, bread like France. Even a French bookstore! Rhodia legal pads!

I was never arrested by Colombia’s DAS, merely detained briefly once for bad language. I got the equivalent of a “time out” at the airport. They decided that my Spanish wasn’t good enough to sustain an accusation of improper use of the language. Lesson learned. I used to have a cédula de extranjería. I don’t have that brown booklet anymore and I assume that the records were lost when M-19 stormed the Supreme Court in Bogotá and burned the files. It would be nice to get it back.